He left Mormonism while serving a mission and heavily studied the LDS church

To clarify: A post-mormon is different from an ex-Mormon in that the
post-Mormon has simply grown out of it. A post-Mormon is like someone
who gets a divorce, but is still on (somewhat) friendly terms with the
ex. You're fairly glad you've had the experience, but you really don't
feel like getting back on the same ride again. Of course, this is a lot
easier for people who get out of the Church while they're still single,
and whose extended family is fairly laid back about unbelieving
relatives. I and my friends have been fortunate on both counts.

Truth be told, I've never written to someone based upon their web page,
but yours is just too good.

My name's Garett Jones, and I'm 25. I was quite active in the church
during high school and at BYU. I actually had a lot of great
intellectual experiences within the LDS church. I'm sure other people
have had bad experiences with LDS leaders, but mine, almost without
exception, encouraged me to read widely on the issues of Mormonism. I
argued about LDS theology a lot, both with my Mormon and non-Mormon
friends. My high point was when Dr. Walter Martin, radio's "Bible
Answer Man" and author of "The Maze of Mormonism," hung up on me on live
radio. I read a lot of anti-Mormon and academic writings about the
church, but was never really troubled by many of the issues that a lot
of the people on your page seem to have been troubled by.

The temple ceremony, for example, struck me as just the kind of ritual
that the God of Old Testament would come up with. And sure, the
ceremony might be influenced heavily by Joseph Smith's immediate
(Masonic) environment, but I'm sure Jesus wouldn't have made analogies
about camels going through the eye of a needle if He had been born in
England instead of the Middle East. The same principle applies
elsewhere: Any intellecutal or historical problem that existed for
Mormonism seemed to apply at least as strongly against Christianity or
Judaism. This made Mormonism look less like the mere fraud that its
opponents often claimed it was, and more like an authentic religious
tradition. The LDS faith might turn out to be false, but it ranked no
lower in intellectual respectability than the other monotheistic faiths.

I guess my point here is that part of the reason I stayed in Mormonism
so long was that the people arguing against Mormonism were using such
ridiculously bad arguments. I tried to find the most rigorous reasoning
and the strongest research that opposed LDS theology, but the best they
could come up with was stuff like horses in the Book of Mormon. It's so
easy for a Latter-Day Saint to simply write the horse references off as
either a slight mistranslation or a gap in current scientific knowledge
that that kind of "evidence" wasn't worth the time of day to me. And
for every horse problem there was something like Hugh Nibley's "Two
Shots in the Dark" or Eugene England's work on Lehi's alleged travels
across Saudi Arabia, apologetic works that made Mormon historical and
theological claims look vaguely plausible. There were bright,
thoughtful people on both sides of the Mormon apologetics divide, but
the average IQ was definitely a couple of dozen points higher in the
Mormon camp.

And despite the desire of many post-Mormons to believe that they were
brainwashed in an especially thorough manner, I don't think that the bad
reasoning used by many Mormons is any more egregious than the bad
reasoning used by atheists or Republicans or feminists or whoever. Bad
reasoning on critical issues -- and the reinforcement of bad reasoning
by peer groups -- is a common human trait. I was never convinced, and
am still unconvinced, that a religion is false solely because it has
stupid people defending it. Some people are addicted to Mormonism, and
others are addicted to reruns of "Welcome Back Kotter." But people give
up both of them all the time. And remember, fewer than 50 percent of
Mormons are active in the Church at any given time, so it can't be all
that oppressive.

I would agree, though, that the Missionary Training Center fits a lot of
the standard criteria for brainwashing and "cult"-type practices. In
the MTC, free thought and free debate are strongly condemned, and
contact with outsiders is strictly regulated. These are all traits
common to so-called "cults." Of course, since you know what the rules
are before you go there, you should decide before you become a
missionary whether or not you believe in the Church. Sure, it's a big
decision for a 19-year-old, but life is all about big decisions. This
is just another one of them.

Anyway, I was a eventually a missionary too, but I decided after about
four months out that I didn't believe in it. My reasons had a lot to do
with the epistemology behind the concept of testimony, and it took me a
long time to take care of all the intellectual loose ends. Basically,
my problem was that I kept having "spiritual experiences" toward
obviously non-Mormon ideas. The irony is that most of the non-Mormon
stuff I read had been assigned in BYU classes. Eventually, I figured
out that spiritual experiences were a completely inaccurate way of
determining truth, and so I left my mission (By the way, I was supposed
to go to Portugal, but was waiting for my visa in Sacramento when I
decided I didn't believe in it).

My mission president in Sacramento was quite nice about it all, and he
helped to get me a really cheap airfare home. It was only some of the
other missionaries who were visibly angry. I think the event that
pushed them over the edge was when I gave away my garments to one of the
missionaries I liked the most (he also happened to be about my size). I
told the Elders that I wouldn't be needing the garments any more, since
the Church wasn't true. That did not go over well.

Since then, I've helped a bunch of my BYU roommates out of the realm of
belief, as well as a couple of friends at Berkeley who kindly give me
some credit for their post-Mormon status.

Hope you find some of this to be new and interesting. If you'd like to
use any of it, feel free to edit at will, though I would like to retain
credit for the invention of the term "post-Mormon." I'm told that the phrase is catching on in the Berkeley LDS community, as well as on a couple of liberal LDS mailing lists. These intellectual property issues get so crazy nowadays....